Turk turned back in Grizzly’s direction, hunting for the parachute. It wasn’t where he thought it would be. His heart lurched and a hole opened in his stomach: Where the hell was his wingmate?
Finally he found the chute, farther east than he had thought. That was a good thing—it was farther from the city.
“I have a chute,” he told the AWACS. “A good chute. He’s looking good. I have him.”
A fireball rose from the direction of the city. The missile battery that targeted him had just been hit by radiation-tracking missiles.
Turk settled into a wide orbit above the parachute. The AWACS vectored in more support aircraft; the SAR helicopter and the Blackhawk with the SAS soldiers both headed for a rescue.
Turk spotted a pair of pickup trucks coming from the direction of the city. He dropped low and accelerated, heading in their direction.
“I have two trucks approaching the landing area,” he told the controller.
“Roger that. We’re seeing them.”
“I’m hitting them.”
“Stand by,” said the controller.
The ROEs directed that Turk could only shoot at the trucks if they took hostile action. But there was no question in his mind what he was going to do. He rolled toward them.
I should have hit the kids earlier.
But they were kids.
“Shooter Four, you are not authorized to engage.”
“Give me a break,” snapped Turk.
“Repeat?”
“I’m going to protect my guy.”
“Shooter, you are not cleared to engage. We have them under surveillance.”
Where the hell was your surveillance when he was hit? Turk thought. But he didn’t say that. He forced himself to be logical—got back inside his calm pilot head.
“I’m going to check them out,” he told the AWACS.
“Predator is overhead,” said the controller. “We are looking at the truck. No hostile activity or indication at this time.”
Turk tucked the A–10E toward the ground, riding up parallel to the road. The trucks were ahead.
“Shooter Four, this is Shooter One,” said Ginella over the radio. Her voice was sharp. “Say your status.”
“Checking out two trucks headed in Grizzly’s direction, Colonel,” responded Turk.
“Be advised, Big Eyes is telling us those are civilian trucks. You are not to engage. Repeat. Do not engage.”
“Negative,” said Turk, who was now close enough to see the vehicles. “Both have men in the back. Uniforms.”
“Don’t shoot them, Turk. You are not cleared.”
He flashed by.
“Shooter Four, what’s your status?” asked the controller.
Turk didn’t respond. He pulled the Hog around, checked the air around him, looked at the ground, then put the A–10’s nose directly over the road.
If he wanted, he could take both trucks with his gun in short order.
And maybe he should do that.
Was he compensating for having screwed up earlier? But he hadn’t screwed up—he’d done the right thing. They had been kids. Surely.
He knew what he saw. And yet the other Hog had been hit by a missile. The facts were the facts.
“Turk, acknowledge,” said Ginella. “Where are you and what are you doing?”
“I’m looking at them. The trucks. They’re on the road. They’re a mile from where Grizzly’s coming down. Going in that direction.”
He was sure they must be soldiers—rebels wouldn’t be coming out from the Castle.
Maybe they’d shoot at him. He pressed the plane down, went over the trucks at barely fifty feet.
No flash, no launch warning. Not a peep.
By the time he banked away, the trucks had stopped dead in the road. Both made quick U-turns and headed back in the direction they’d come.
“Still think they’re sightseers, huh?” said Turk.
“Not the point, Shooter Four,” responded Ginella.
“I have helicopters inbound,” said Turk, spotting the approaching birds. He could hear them calling Grizzly on the Guard or emergency band. Grizzly acknowledged, then waved.
“SAR assets in contact,” reported Turk. “They’re in contact.”
“Let the choppers do their work,” said Ginella.
“That’s my plan.”
Shooter Squadron escorted the helicopter to the coast, then split away as the chopper headed for the Italian carrier Garibaldi.
Turk got a fuel warning when he was still twenty miles from Sicily. He contacted the tower and the entire squadron was bumped up, allowing him to land right away.
He pulled himself out of the cockpit, feeling as if every part of his body had been pounded.
Ginella met him on the tarmac.
“What the hell happened?” she asked.
“We were north of the hamlet. They’d just made the pickup of the SAS guys.” Turk held his hands wide, trying to sort it out in his head. It had been so vivid when it happened, yet now it seemed clouded. “There was a group of kids—”
“Start from the beginning. What happened with the SAS guys? Did they find the pilot?”
Turk realized he wasn’t even sure, though in fact they had. As he recounted the story, he realized he had either blanked out or simply forgotten vast portions.
Given how much debriefing he’d been doing over the past few days, he ought to be getting better at this, but for some reason it seemed worse. More details would occur to him as he went, and he had to backtrack and revise.
“How did you let him get hit?” she asked finally.
“I—I didn’t let him get hit,” said Turk. “He turned right. I told him to break left. He went into their path.”
Would that have saved him, though? Turk wasn’t sure.
She shook her head.
“The only people I saw on the ground were kids,” added Turk.
“Kids with a launcher?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
Ginella stared at him.
“You think I screwed up?” he said.
“You didn’t see the missile on the ground?”
“I saw kids. That’s what I saw.”
She turned and walked away without saying anything else.
4
Tripoli
Kharon’s collaboration with the Russians had brought him any number of complications over the years, and he knew better than to trust them any more than absolutely necessary. And so while he could have asked Foma to arrange for access to Russian satellite intelligence on the war, he decided it was much safer to simply steal it.
Russian hackers were arguably the best in the world at getting into secure systems, even better than the Chinese groups that tended to dominate news reports. But the security on the Russian government’s own systems left much to be desired. The feed sent to certain Spetsnaz units in Chad and southern Libya used a common and easily defeated encryption. Getting past it was child’s play.
Finding that out had taken a bit of work on Kharon’s part, but now he enjoyed the benefits, looking at near real-time satellite images as they were relayed to the unit. He sat at the console in his university lair, flipping through the quadrants as they loaded.
Nothing much had changed in the past two weeks. The reinforced lines were still where they had been for days. The only exception was in the east, where a number of tanks were poised to strike near Sawknah, a small city liberated by the rebels early in the war. Wisps of black smoke drifted in the area.
Zooming in for detail, Kharon could see irregular troops lining the ruins at the southwest corner of the road. The buildings immediately behind them were badly battered. Many were heaps of rubble. The one three-story that remained intact on that side of the street had several men on the roof, obviously snipers.
It was impossible to predict the outcome of the battle from the image. But the fact that the government felt strong enough to fight back there surprised Kharon. Everything he had seen to this point had led him to think they were not only losing, but on their last legs. But launching an attack some two hundred miles from their strong point implied they were stronger than he believed.